This invention relates to test and measurement instruments and, more particularly, to test and measurement instruments with regular expression processing of serial bit streams.
Regular expressions can be used in analyzing character streams. For example, programs such as Perl and AWK are based on regular expression pattern matching. A regular expression can be used to define a matching sequence of characters. However, such regular expression matching is performed on data that has already been converted into a byte, word, or other multi-bit format. In contrast, serial bit streams are not grouped into such multi-bit formats.